Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace

by Jodi Dean

In a provocative analysis of public culture and popular concerns, Jodi Dean examines how serious UFO-logists and their pop-culture counterparts tap into fears, phobias, and conspiracy theories with a deep past and a vivid present in American society. Aliens, the author shows, provide cultural icons through which to access the new conditions of democratic politics at the millennium. Because of the technological complexity of our age, political choices and decisions have become virtually meaningless, practically impossible. How do we judge what is real, believable, trustworthy, or authoritative? When the truth is out there, but we can trust no one, Dean argues, paranoia is indeed the most sensible response. Aliens have invaded the United States. No longer confined to science fiction and tabloids, aliens appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, at candy counters (in chocolate-covered flying saucers and Martian melon-flavored lollipops), and on Internet web sites. Aliens are at the center of a faculty battle at Harvard. They have been used to market AT&T cellular phones, Milky Way candy bars, Kodak film, Diet Coke, Stove-Top Stuffing, skateboard accessories, and abduction insurance. A Gallup poll reports that 27 percent of Americans believe space aliens have visited Earth. A Time/CNN poll finds 80 percent of its respondents believe the U.S. government is covering up knowledge of the existence of aliens. What does the widespread American belief in extraterrestrials say about the public sphere? How common are our assumptions about what is real? Is there any such thing as "common" sense?
Aliens, the author shows, provide cultural icons through which to access the new conditions of democratic politics at the millennium. Because of the technological complexity of our age, political choices and decisions have become virtually meaningless, practically impossible. How do we judge what is real, believable, trustworthy, or authoritative? When the truth is out there, but we can trust no one, Dean argues, paranoia is indeed the most sensible response.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Conspiracy Theories, The United States Of America

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited eleven books, including The Communist Horizon and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR LOOKS AT THE CULTURAL INFLUENCE OF UFOS

Jodi Dean (born 1962) is a professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She wrote in the Introduction to this 1998 book, “Aliens have invaded the United States. No longer confined to science fiction and Elvis-obsessed tabloids, aliens appear in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal… Aliens are at the center of a battle at Harvard, caught in the university’s furor over the psychologist John Mack’s work on alleged abduction experiencers and its attempt to revoke … [his] tenure. Aliens have been seen … at MIT. There, at the 1992 Abduction Study Conference, psychiatrists, abductees, ufologists, and professors … seriously discussed the possibility that aliens are abducting people… and using their sperm and ova to create a hybrid-human species.” (Pg. 1-3)

She continues, “This is a book about alien space, about following and creating links from cultural images of the alien to tales of UFOs and abduction, to computer and communication technologies, to political passivity and conspiracy thinking in the contemporary United States… we can traverse webs through U.S. society … and better understand American paranoia…. I look at the discredited and stigmatized knowledge of aliens and what this knowledge might hold for mainstreams in American culture. Abduction, I suggest, is… a symptomatic or extreme form of what is widespread in everyday life at the millennium.” (Pg. 5)

She explains, “This book’s title, ‘Aliens in America,’ is linked to Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ‘Angels in America.’ At the same time, it connects with the only singly authored book sympathetic to ufology that has been published by a university press: the Temple University historian David Jacobs’s ‘The UFO Controversy in America.’” (Pg. 18-19)

She says of the Betty and Barney Hill case, “The Hill case played a seminal role in ufology. The credibility of the Hills set them apart from the contactees, thereby challenging the line ufologists had drawn between ‘sighting’ cases and ‘occupant’ cases. Their case thus came to establish the contours of the abduction narrative as it would appear during the seventies… The Hill case also installed into ufology a major new research tool, hypnosis.” (Pg. 49)

She observes, “Since 1987 thousands of abductees have come out, legitimated by Harvard professor John Mack’s work and authorized through the shift from consensus reality to virtual reality. On-line and face-to-face support groups are available to help abductees access, process, and create home pages for their experience. By the mid-1990s the abduction narrative is established enough for the New York Times Magazine to satirize [them]… The New Yorker can publish alien abduction cartoons, confident that readers will get the joke. Abduction is a regular occurrence on network TV.” (Pg. 154)

She says of the 1997 MUFON international symposium, “David Jacobs, the Temple University historian, announced: ‘The abduction phenomenon has changed everything.’ Jacobs urged the audience to forget Roswell and refuse conspiracy theory. Research on both, he argued, had been a fruitless waste of time. He stressed the importance of disentangling ufology from anything that hinted of ‘New Age.’ UFOs are about science and evidence, not past lives and spiritual enlightenment. Abduction, Jacobs claimed, produces precisely that evidence… he did hint that [the aliens’] purpose has to do more with human physiology, with reproduction, with sex, than with technology. The big alien secret, the truth of the alien, it seems, has to do with sex, a sex that in nearly all accounts of abduction is presumed to be straight and procreative even when conjoined with the alien.” (Pg. 194)

She concludes, “Could it be a coincidence that Pathfinder landed on the Fourth of July, Independence Day? [The film] ‘Independence Day’ featured the invasion of Earth; perhaps the techies and engineers at JPL had in mind a mini-invasion of Mars. Maybe NASA wanted to point toward a new world order, a global network that united people all over the globe. This time, instead of using computers to defeat the aliens, folks would use them to adopt their own extraterrestrial perspective. Enmeshed in the networks of information and virtuality that are technoculture at the millennium, we can make not any link plausible, even convincing. But will we find anyone to believe us?” (Pg. 197)

This book will interest those studying the effect of UFOs/aliens on contemporary American culture.